The free general admission policy at the Dallas Museum of Art, and its DMA Friends members' program, instituted a year ago by director Maxwell Anderson, are paying handsome dividends. Both are getting national attention. Tyler Green, who writes the influential blog, Modern Art Notes -- and who, by the way, is returning to Dallas on Thursday night to air another of his live national podcasts, this one on the Robert Smithson show -- recently weighed on the DMA's free general admission in this piece.

During the 2013 fiscal year that wrapped up at the end of September, 542,218 people walked through the door at the DMA. Keep in mind that for the first quarter of the 2013 fiscal year, free general admission had not yet been implemented.

And the free membership program Anderson instituted? “As of today, more than 42,000 people have signed up,” he says. “But those are just statistical niceties. Behind the statistics is a museum that feels open and welcoming to everyone.”

Deputy Director Rob Stein followed Anderson to Dallas from the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Stein said the DMA sought to “flip membership on its head” with Friends and Partners “and really think about what it meant to encourage and drive participation with the museum.”

Results came in right away.

“Many people said they had never been to the DMA or hadn’t been for a decade or more,” Stein said. The museum set what Stein called an aggressive goal for the rewards program’s first year, seeking 22,000 Friends within a year.

“We passed that sometime in June,” he says. As successful as Friends has been, Stein’s also thrilled with Partners, which seeks to recruit “partners in philanthropy.” As levels of donation grow, so do the partners’ perks.

Since the program was implemented, the DMA has signed up 15,000 Partners. And since his arrival in 2012, Anderson has brought in almost $36 million in new grants and donations.

The DMA enjoyed terrific shows during 2013, in particular retrospectives honoring Marc Chagall and photographer Cindy Sherman, and “Hotel Texas,” which honored the memory of President John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline.

“As you know, philosophically, I don’t look at exhibitions as drivers of revenue,” Anderson says. “I look at them as programmatic offerings. … I look at the museum’s operating budget as a whole and make sure we bring it under balance, as we did for the 17th year in a row.

“I’m not as particular about where the dollars come from, in the sense of philanthropy, grants, foundation money, as turnstile dollars, which to me are of relative consequence. I’m more interested in the bottom line of the whole museum.”

Foremost among new donations and grants were the $17 million from trustee Marguerite Hoffman for the acquisition of paintings by Old Masters; $9 million from an anonymous donor to help cover free general admission, the DMA Friends program and digitization initiatives; $5 million from an anonymous donor to go toward exhibitions, operations and the DMA endowment; and $2 million from an anonymous donor for the new Paintings Conservation Studio, although the museum has raised a total of $2.9 million for the conservation studio and equipment.

The director is even more bullish on 2014, alluding to a landmark exhibition on Islamic art that opens at the DMA in March and the New Cities Summit in June, which will bring 1,000 participants from 40 countries to Dallas.

“I’m excited to watch Dallas come of age culturally,” he says, predicting that the Arts District may well give rise to “a cultural ecosystem unlike any other city.”